According to Pia Dietze, a social psychology doctoral student at
NYU and a lead author of the study, previous research has shown that people from
different social classes vary in how they tend to behave towards
other people. So, she wanted to shed some light on where such
behaviors could have originated.

First, the team had to work out how to calculate whether people
were paying attention to others or not.

The research was divided into three separate studies. For
the first, Dietze and NYU psychology lab director
Professor Eric Knowles asked 61 volunteers to walk
along the street for one block while wearing Google Glass to
record everything they looked at. These people were also asked to
identify themselves as from a particular social class: either
poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper
class.

An independent group watched the recordings and made note of the
various people and things each Glass wearer looked at and for how
long. The results showed that class identification, or what class
each person said they belonged to, had an impact on how long
they looked at the people who walked past them.

"On average, our studies show that each 1-step increase in social
class is accompanied by a gradual decline in attention towards
humans," Dietze told Business Insider. "However, we usually see
the most extreme differences in attention towards humans between
people from the working class and the middle class, such that
working class participants pay significantly more attention to
humans than their middle-class counterparts."

A
street scene that the participants had to look
at.Dietze &
Knowles

During Study 2, participants viewed street scenes while the
team tracked their eye movements. Again, higher class was
associated with reduced attention to people in the images.

For the third and final study, the results suggested that
this difference could stem from the way the brain works, rather
than being a deliberate decision. Close to
400 participants took part in an online test where they
had to look at alternating pairs of images, each containing a
different face and five objects.

Whereas higher class participants took longer to notice when the
face was different in the alternate image compared to lower
classes, the amount of time it took to detect the change of
objects did not differ between them.

The team reached the conclusion that faces seem to be
more effective in grabbing the attention of individuals who come
from relatively lower class backgrounds.

Dietze said that there is some evidence that people who consider
themselves in higher classes have certain personality traits that
could mean they are less interested in the general public. Also,
several studies have shown that someone's cultural background can
influence how their attention is allocated.

"Researchers have uncovered that higher class is associated with
increases in narcissism, decreases in dispositional compassion,
higher feelings of psychological entitlement," she said.

It's not all in your head — or is it?

There are several possible reasons for this. In the
California and Toronto study, the authors conclude that because
of a lack of resources, lower-class individuals tend to focus on
the "external, social context to understand events
in their lives" and as a result, "they orient
to other people to navigate their social
environments."

"Whereas lower-class individuals tend to regard other people as
relevant to their current goals and well-being, higher-class
perceivers tend to appraise others as lacking in motivational
relevance," Dietze said. "We argue that class cultures shape
relevance appraisals almost immediately after the perceiver
encounters another person.

In other words, people from privileged backgrounds are less
likely to be socially dependent on others and are therefore less
likely to see people as potentially rewarding, threatening, or
worth paying attention to.

In future research, Dietze said she would like to use virtual
reality technology to get more accurate results from
participants' eye movements to better understand how
different people react to the world around them.

"We will measure if social class background can shape attention,
stress, and emotional responses to varying street scenes," she
said. "The more we know about the effect of social class
differences, the better we can address widespread societal issues
— this research is just one piece of the puzzle."